(Details)
PARIS, December 21 (Reuters) – An executive from the Islamic State in the Grand Sahara (EIGS) group, responsible for the assassination of six French aid workers and their two Nigerien companions in August 2020 in an animal reserve in Niger, was ” neutralized “by the forces of Operation Barkhane, announced Tuesday the staff of the French armies.
Soumana Boura, presented as a group leader of the EIGS, was killed by an airstrike carried out on December 20 in Niger, north of the town of Tillabéri, in the area known as the “three borders” on the borders of Niger, Mali and Burkina Faso, specifies the staff.
On August 9, 2020, a commando from the jihadist group traveling by motorbike murdered six French employees of the humanitarian NGOs Acted and Impact based in Niger, while they were visiting the Kouré reserve, in the southwest of the country, where a woman lives. endangered giraffe species. Their guide and driver were also executed.
According to the army staff, Soumana Boura was part of the EIGS commando which carried out these assassinations on the order of the group’s emir, Adnan Abou Walid Sahraoui, himself killed by the Barkhane force in August 2021.
“He had filmed the execution and had ensured the media coverage,” wrote the staff in a press release.
The French army has increased in recent months the “neutralizations” of EIGS executives in Niger and neighboring Mali, without however succeeding in putting an end to the activity of armed groups in the Sahelo-Saharan strip.
This powerlessness is causing growing tensions between Paris and some leaders in the region, including the ruling junta in Bamako, against the backdrop of the latter’s rapprochement with Russia, while French President Emmanuel Macron announced in June that Operation Barkhane would be come to an end and that the French army would resize and reorganize its presence in the region. (Tangi Salaün, edited by Matthieu Protard)
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